458 pages ; 25 cm

Kirk defines "the conservative mind" by examining such brilliant men as Edmund Burke, James Fenimore Cooper, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Quincy Adams, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Benjamin Disraeli, Cardinal Newman, George Santayana, and T.S. Eliot. Vigorously written, the book represents conservatism as an ideology born of sound intellectual traditions

Includes bibliographical references (pages 441-451) and index

1. The idea of conservatism -- 2. Burke and the politics of prescription : Burke's career ; The radical systems ; Providence and veneration ; Prejudice and prescription ; The rights of civil and social man ; Equality and aristocracy ; The principle of order -- 3. John Adams and liberty under law ; Federalists and republicans ; Alexander Hamilton ; Fisher Ames' vaticinations ; John Adams as a psychologist ; The aristocracy of nature ; American constitutions ; Marshall and the metamorphosis of federalism -- 4. Romantics and Utilitarians : Benthamism and Walter Scott ; Canning and enlightened conservatism ; Coleridge and conservative ideas ; The triumph of abstraction -- 5. Southern Conservatism: Randolph and Calhoun : Southern impulses ; Randolph on the peril of positive legislation ; The rights of minorities: Calhoun ; The valor of the south --6. Liberal conservatives: Macaulay, Cooper, Tocqueville : Burke's influence on liberalism ; Macaulay on democracy ; Fenimore Cooper and a gentleman's America ; Tocqueville on democratic despotism ; Democratic prudence -- 7. Transitional conservatism: New England sketches : Industrialism as a leveller ; John Quincy Adams and progress: his aspirations and his failure ; The illusions of transcendentalism ; Brownson on the conservative power of Catholicism ; Nathaniel Hawthorne: society and sin -- 8. Conservatism with imagination: Disraeli and Newman : Marx's materialism; and the fruits of liberalism ; Disraeli and Tory loyalties ; Newman: the sources of knowledge and the idea of education ; The age of discussion: Bagehot -- 9. Legal and historical conservatism: a time of foreboding : Liberalism and collectivism: John Stuart Mill, Comte, and positivism ; Stephen on the ends of life and politics ; Maine: status and contract ; Lecky: illiberal democracy -- 10. Conservatism frustrated: America, 1865-1918 : The gilded age ; James Russell Lowell's perplexities ; Godkin on democratic opinion ; Henry Adams on the degradation of the democratic dogma ; Brooks Adams and a world of terrible energies -- 11. English conservatism adrift: the twentieth century : The end of aristocratic politics: 1906 ; George Gissing and the nether world ; Arthur Balfour: his spirit of conservatism; and the tide of socialism ; The books of W.H. Mallock: a conservative synthesis. positivism deflated; socialism vs. ability ; A dreary conservatism between wars -- 12. Critical conservatism: Babbit, More, Santayana : Pragmatism: the fumbling of America ; Irving Babbit's humanism: the higher will in a democracy ; Paul Elmer More on justice and faith ; George Santayana buries liberalism ; America in search of ideas -- 13. The promise of conservatism : The sickness of radicalism ; The planners' state and new elite ; The conservatives' task: their British prospects ; The recrudescence of American conservatism: difficulties and duties ; The United States as destroyer and conservator ; Who are the conservatives?

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